


In a world I never made

by lbmisscharlie



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Forced memory erasure, Incest, M/M, Memory Alteration, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-15
Updated: 2012-02-15
Packaged: 2017-10-31 04:59:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/340185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for <a href="http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/15638.html?thread=90092054#t90092054">this</a> prompt at the kinkmeme: <i>Sherlock and Mycroft were always in love. They became lovers at some point in Sherlock's teens. They kept it a secret of course but one time they weren't quite careful enough and they were caught. Their parents made Sherlock undergo memory wiping a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.</i></p><p>The memories, as they go, collapse around him. Mycroft's voice is quiet, distant, and everything is just a little bit wrong. But it doesn't matter: right or wrong, he won't remember later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In a world I never made

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by the wonderful non_canonical

“Do you ever wonder if there’s something wrong with us?”

The wait until Mycroft answers is interminable. Because of course there is; how could it be otherwise? 

The air between them, squalid and small, grows close in the wait. Mycroft touches the tip of his umbrella to the floor, once, the sound louder than bells.

“All lives end. All hearts are broken.” Two true things. Sherlock’s seen one but not the other, sees it daily: dead flesh and blood and the immense lack of life. Their parents’ bodies seen in wood boxes through a haze of drugs and Mycroft’s hand fleetingly at his back. The other he knows like cellular reproduction, like a heart beating or the sun rising. Observable fact. He knows it, yet he’s never felt it.

That disturbs him.

“Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock.” Mycroft is trying to convince someone, but whom? Sherlock takes the cigarette and breathes it in and Mycroft watches his mouth.

Green flashes in the corner of his eye but when he turns his head it’s the grey hospital wall. He doesn’t look at Mycroft. When he lowers his hand from his mouth, there’s a breeze on his fingertips. He walks away and leaves his brother behind.

++

He’s running around the back of the house – from Mummy, perhaps? He’s not sure. He rounds the corner, one hand outstretched for balance, and the brick is rough under his fingertips.

He stops when he reaches the back garden, panting as he leans against the wall. The sun is the pale, cool yellow of an uncertain spring and the trees are just blooming with leaves. He feels a breeze against his fingertips and looks down, finds a cigarette, lit, between them. 

The ash on it is long, like he’s been there and forgotten about it even though he just arrived. He taps it, once, with his finger, and brings it to his lips. Closes his eyes and inhales.

When he opens them his brother’s there. His face has just begun to lose its youthful roundness, taking on a harder and more authoritative edge. He remembers that: Mycroft gone away to university familiar and returned sharper – in all ways. He’s fourteen, then, maybe fifteen, and Mycroft twenty-one. 

He blows out the smoke and steps away from the wall. Takes another drag and lines their feet up. Mycroft watches, only, but the look on his face – pity and sorrow and loss – isn’t what he remembers. 

Sherlock tilts his face up and exhales. Mycroft breaths in his air, his ash, the oxygen his body didn’t quite use, and it’s only an inch that Sherlock has to traverse to bring their lips together. 

Mycroft’s are cold and still against his and that’s not right, that’s not – he pulls away. “This isn’t how it happened,” his brother says, gravely, and in the corners of his eyes the green starts to grey. 

“It could have been, it could have –” and he brings their mouths together again, on his toes, burns in his calves, because he hasn’t hit his growth spurt yet, will in a year’s time. He’ll grow and grow within an inch of Mycroft, as if he’s always following. As if he’ll never catch him up. 

“No. It couldn’t.” Mycroft’s hands are on his shoulders then his wrists then pushing him away.

“It could, it could!” Sherlock’s voice cries and the house begins to crumble, devoid of colour, and it’s not fair, it’s not okay. “No!”

“You can’t keep it, Sherlock, you can’t.” Mycroft looks sadder than he’s ever seen him, even sadder than at the graves of their parents. “You can’t make it into something it wasn’t so it will stay.”

“No! You can’t have it. It didn’t – it’s mine, it’s my mind –” and the words cut off as the world collapses around him.

++

He adjusts the sheet over his shoulder and sits on the sofa in Buckingham Palace. This is his brother’s domain, yes, and he delights in making it a little less orderly.

“Sex doesn’t alarm me,” he snaps, and it annoys him more than he wishes to let on. That Mycroft said that, that he thinks that, that he looks at him with an aggrieved little smirk like there’s something Sherlock doesn’t know.

“How would you know?” Mycroft answers, and Sherlock would know, he should know. It’s his body, after all, his mind and his desires.

++

“This did. Happen, I mean.”

“Yes,” Mycroft says, and looks pained.

“We were here, in your bed.” 

“Yes.”

“And I touched you like this.” And he does so, flat of his palm against the broad of his brother’s chest.

“Yes.”

“And this.”

“Yes.”

“And here.”

And all Mycroft says is yes, yes, yes, voice atonal and distant, not at all like it had been. He says yes, yes, yes, even as Sherlock screams no. As the sheets twist up around Sherlock, binding him in place, white cotton around his wrists. As the sheets fade away and the restraint becomes something else.

++

He plays his violin but he’s not sure who he’s playing for. John, dependable and long-suffering. Familiar. Comfortable. Irene, interesting and unpredictable. Aggressive. New. 

Neither fits and neither’s right. They’re intrigue and annoyance, fondness and exasperation, but not love. But then – would Sherlock know?

In the aeroplane, the flight of the dead, Mycroft is sorry. When he snaps, when he shouts, Sherlock expects recriminations, anger, curses, threats. Mycroft delivers none: he’s disappointed. Not in Sherlock, but in himself. His failure to _see_ , his failure of judgement. His failure of trust.

“I drove you into her path. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” Those are the truest and hardest words a Holmes can say. 

Irene deals with Mycroft then, as if Sherlock didn’t matter, but they work better as a team, always have though Sherlock resists, and when Mycroft’s about to capitulate, to surrender, Sherlock’s ready with a surprise attack.

“Sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side,” and Sherlock doesn’t lose, he just renegotiates the terms of the game.

“I imagine John Watson thinks love’s a mystery to me,” he says, and doesn’t see Mycroft’s eyes fall.

++

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your – you can still stop this!” They’re standing in the foyer of their childhood home; its familiarity mocks Sherlock, each tile and panel and column imbued with years of memories. He knows some he’ll keep, but not this one, not this moment. 

He flexes his fingers and looks at his brother and wonders if he’ll miss it.

Mycroft’s coat is on and he holds Sherlock’s out. Sherlock struggles against – against hands he can’t see, because there’s only the two of them there. Two black squares, two white squares of the checkerboard tile between them and Sherlock thinks of hopping from one to the next – “Off the cracks, Mycroft, else you’ll drown” – and playing chess in their heads.

“It has to happen, Sherlock.” 

“It doesn’t! It doesn’t! It’s my mind, Mycroft, you can’t –” Sherlock shakes his head viciously and tries to strike out but his feet skid on the floor. They slide and he’s falling and the black-and-white floor is fading, squares melding together and Mycroft’s voice in his ear is quiet, sounds far away.

“Let it happen. It has to be this way. I’m sorry for where I led you.”

++

John’s two steps behind him, ready for his plan, his scheme, his clever trick. It’s none of those, though: it’s Mycroft.

Mycroft, who’s built himself a small bureaucratic empire on the power of his persuasion. Mycroft, who can still be felled by the right inflection, the precise intonation of his brother’s voice. He lifts his phone.

“Hello brother dear,” he coos, and at the small, stilted intake of breath he knows he’s won.

++

The place is hazy, but Sherlock knows it: Mycroft’s first London flat, cool and impersonal. Its sleek modern lines will be easily torn down.

Mycroft’s eyes are heavy and dark and unwilling and wanting. He stays utterly still; it’s Sherlock who reaches, Sherlock who touches, Sherlock whose lips caress skin and whose hands tear at buttons. “Brother dear,” he croons, tongue at his pulse, and the moan Mycroft makes is small and broken. 

“Please,” he says, “please,” and Mycroft does. He does and he does until he doesn’t and Sherlock’s shoulders can’t keep the walls standing.

++

“You know how it always upset Mummy.” There’s a sardonic edge to his voice that Sherlock can’t read and it frustrates him.

“I upset her? Me? It wasn’t me that upset her, Mycroft,” he spits back and Mycroft flinches, subtle enough that only Sherlock can see. They’d died before he could do anything truly upsetting. A car crash: a pedestrian way to die, boring and ordinary. The funeral was dull. He’d shot up on the train and avoided Mycroft’s eyes and thought of all the more interesting things he could be doing.

He can feel Mycroft’s eyes on him still and it makes the skin at the nape of his neck itch. He leaves and walks away with John at his shoulder and the back of his throat tastes like excitement and taboo, like he’s getting away with something. The air is damp and cold and he doesn’t quite register the smell of old leather hanging heavy in the rain.

++

He doesn’t want to open the door, to feel the smooth grain of the wood beneath his hand. “No, I won’t,” he calls to the air. “I won’t.”

“You must,” says a voice and it’s not someone he recognizes.

“No,” he says again, firmly, hands in his pockets and eyes stubbornly closed.

Then there’s Mycroft’s voice, broken and quiet, so close he can feel the breath on his ear. “Please, Sherlock.” He looks, but his brother’s not there. The door opens without his hand.

It’s just how it’s always been: tall, imposing stacks filled with mouldering books, Father’s desk heavy and stolid in the middle of the worn Turkish carpet. In a moment, he’s up against the wall and he feels scared and that’s not right, because he didn’t. In the moment that was, the real moment, not this shifting, constructed memory, he was elated, reckless, a little drunk.

Mycroft’s there now, one hand on Sherlock’s hip and his face apologetic which is all wrong too. He should be flushed, mouth curling into an illicit grin as his hand moves down, as his lips touch Sherlock’s neck. Instead, his touch is cold, perfunctory, and when he drops to his knees it’s with a dull, resigned thud.

The sensations should be good – they were, he knows – but they leave him with a pain in his chest, like he’s lost all his air. Mycroft’s fingers tap at his hip and he realises he’s counting. The door bursts open and the tapping stops.

Mycroft stands and Sherlock covers himself and there’s Mummy’s blurry face and Father’s, red and indignant, behind her. There’s shouting and yelling and Sherlock can’t say anything and Mycroft yells, “It’s my fault, it’s my fault,” and that’s not right either except it is. Not true, but he did say it.

Sherlock distantly remembers pushing past his father and rushing out of the room, impulsive and angry, but instead he waits. Waits for the books to fall off the shelves and the room to cave in around him.

++

Mycroft comes by Baker Street. He doesn’t, often; the space is wholly Sherlock and John’s – they inhabit it and it lives in them – and Mycroft doesn’t like places he can’t dominate. He prefers places where the rules are aggressively in his favour, where visitors are thrown off. Uncomfortable in the domesticity of 221b, he’s snappish and twitchy. 

He remains standing as they discuss Irene, as John eats breakfast in his worn striped shirt and Sherlock reads the newspaper and Mrs Hudson clears up. She chastises Mycroft – “Family is all we have in the end, Mycroft Holmes” – and the way he snaps is unexpected, unsettling.

++

“Let’s just leave,” he says, or pleads. “We don’t need them. I’ll live with you in London; I’m nineteen, I’m old enough.”

Mycroft shakes his head, steps back. “Family is all we have.”

He said that, yes, but it still doesn’t make sense. “You’re my family. I’m yours; that’s all we need.”

“I’m supposed to protect you.” His voice is raw.

“I don’t need protecting.”

He gives Sherlock a smile that says he’s wrong. This time, Mycroft fades before anything else.

++

“I’ve been thinking of our youth,” he says, deliberately off-hand.

“Oh?” says Mycroft, as if he’s uninterested.

“Oh, yes.” Sherlock waves one hand, his bow tracing erratic circles in the air. His eyes are closed, the strings of his violin caressed by his fingers. “Those halcyon summer days, under the willow tree.” He hazards this, unsure himself why the image of the willow, its branches hanging heavy and protective around him, flickers behind his eyelids. He hears Mycroft shift and slits his eyes, turns his head enough to see his brother looking away.

Mycroft’s hand is tight on the handle of his umbrella. “Is this going somewhere, Sherlock?”

Sherlock stays quiet for one long minute. “No. Just musing.”

Mycroft rises and drops a file onto Sherlock’s lap. “Muse on this, then.” Sherlock ignores it. Lost missile plans: out of the country already, undoubtedly. Dull. He reaches up, quick enough to grab Mycroft’s hand before it’s jerked away, and he can hear Mycroft’s breath, shallow and too fast, in the still of the flat. 

He hands the file back; Mycroft takes it reluctantly. “No.”

“It’s the right thing to do. For the safety of this country.”

Sherlock narrows his eyes, leans forward in his seat. “I don’t care about the right thing, Mycroft.” The door downstairs slams and they both settle back; the air in the room crackles.

++

It’s quiet under the willow; Sherlock has always favoured it as a place to escape, a place to hide. A place for things that shouldn’t be seen, for things that mark him out as different.

“We’re not hurting anyone,” he says, defiant.

“You can’t possibly know that.” Mycroft takes a step closer but stops. “You’re only seventeen,” he says, which isn’t an explanation.

“Old enough to know what I want,” he says, and the grass beneath him still holds the imprint of his body, his hand is still sticky and wet. Mycroft’s hair is mussed in the back, his shirt collar wrinkled.

“It’s wrong.” Mycroft’s voice floats to him though he’s only an arm’s reach away, two steps of dry grass between their feet.

“Only for some definitions of wrong, not all.” Mycroft shakes his head and the world tilts with him. Sherlock’s falling sideways and the ground’s rushing up and they can’t both be happening at once it’s just perception but there it is. He falls and falls and wakes in his bed.

++

The Diogenes is aggressively quiet in a way that makes Sherlock want to rustle, to snap, to cough pointedly and loudly and not-at-all politely. The fact that he doesn’t means something to Mycroft, he’s sure.

The plans are laid and they wait for the spider’s next move. It’s Mycroft’s game now, each play decided many moves in advance, and Sherlock resents it just as he did as a child. Sherlock’s always been more reactionary, impulsive; he doesn’t care for the long game if it makes the present boring.

“This may be the last time I see you, brother dear.” Mycroft looks away, looks down, looks anywhere but at Sherlock. 

“Yes,” he says, shortly. “Do be safe.” Sherlock scoffs and stands to leave. Mycroft, finally, raises his eyes; they settle on Sherlock’s wrists, bare where he’s pushed up his cuffs, as if it’s a safe alternative to looking him in the eye. “Sherlock, I –” 

He stops and Sherlock is thankful.

++

He wakes to leather straps at his wrists and Mycroft’s face above his. “I hate you,” he says, but he doesn’t know why.

Mycroft’s face is weary, too old for its twenty-six years. “I know,” he says, and begins to release the restraints.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [‘The laws of God, the laws of man’](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-laws-of-god-the-laws-of-man/) by AE Housman: “I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made. / They will be master, right or wrong; / Though both are foolish, both are strong.”


End file.
